Russia’s Collision Course With Change

Wall Street Journal

The protests in Russia this week put the government on notice that the rebellious mood on display in Sunday’s parliament elections could well go viral, a message that clearly has the Kremlin nervous. It responded with riot police, mass arrests, and dial-a-mob pro-Putin supporters.

Russians have had much to grumble about for as long as anyone can remember. Yet they have always tended to shake their heads, but not their fists, at injustices. If things seem more serious now it may be because the scale and brazenness of the lawlessness have stretched tolerance to the limits. Sunday’s parliamentary vote in Russia may not have changed the political landscape outright, but it revealed a lot about the growing desire in grass-roots Russia for political change.

The daily grind of corruption was something Russians viewed as the price for a kind of stability and the rise of living conditions, but crimes committed in broad daylight, the perpetrators known and protected by officials, have grown too numerous to ignore. Mr. Putin’s United Russia Party is widely referred to as the “Party of Crooks [or Swindlers] and Thieves” (the reference will get you more than eight million hits on Google).

The protest really took off after September’s announcement by Mr. Putin that he would stand again for president. The prospect of another 12 years of Putin rule and the insult of what is effectively a fait accompli exploded in anti-government tweets and blogs and hasn’t stopped growing.

Recently, Russians have rallied around cases such as the killing of Sergei Magnitsky, a 37-year-old Russian lawyer representing Hermitage Capital Management, who was imprisoned, tortured and beaten to death in 2009 after accusing Russian officials in a well-documented case of perpetrating a massive tax fraud. Posters and videos mentioning the Magnitsky killing and others were a feature of protesters and those campaigning against the governing party this week. The full details of Magnitsky’s imprisonment, mistreatment and ultimate death are set out in a 75-page report released last week to the President’s Human Rights Council in Russia and to the public. The report was downloaded more than 200,000 times in Russia within a few days.

As with the cases of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in 2006, and of human rights lawyer and investigative journalist Stanislav Markelov, who was murdered a mile from the Kremlin in 2009, Magnitsky’s story resonates with Russians for the bravery of his actions to expose corruption and the brutality of his death.

“The Magnitsky case is one of the most emblematic examples of the breakdown of law in Russia,” says William F. Browder, Hermitage’s founder. “Unlike many other murder cases, where there is some plausible deniability about who pulled the trigger, here we have in such granular detail who was responsible and a chain of command that goes right up to the cabinet. Because of that, this is like a cancer that they don’t seem to be able to get rid of. And the more they try to cover up, the more this becomes the Watergate of Russia.”

The U.S. State Department imposed visa sanctions as of July this year on an unspecified number of Russian officials who it says were involved in Magnitsky’s torture and death. A broader bill in the Senate, the Justice for Sergei Magnitsky Act of 2010, sponsored by Ben Cardin (D., Md.) and John McCain (R., Ariz.) and co-sponsored by 26 Democrats and Republicans, is due for hearings next week. There is a similar bill before the Canadian parliament and like-minded initiatives under way in 11 EU member states. The Dutch parliament unanimously passed a resolution in July calling on the government to impose visa sanctions on officials involved in Magnitsky’s imprisonment and death (so far the government hasn’t acted on that resolution).

It’s tempting to draw a dotted line from the Arab Spring to Russia’s winter of discontent, but Russian social bonds are far weaker than those in the Arab world, families are much smaller, and at least a share of the grumbling can probably be numbed away with the proceeds of oil and gas sales. Given the option of fighting for change or leaving, most Russians would probably opt to hit the road.

Many Russians are voting with their feet in what looks like the biggest wave of emigration since the Bolsheviks came to power. In a Levada Centre poll in May, 22% of respondents said they wanted to move abroad permanently, compared to 13% two years earlier. A conservative estimate provided by the national audit office, which tracks tax receipts, is that 1.25 million Russians left in the last decade.

Nor are these largely economic migrants. Estate agents and private-school heads in London, Switzerland, Spain and elsewhere can readily testify to the growing demand from well-healed Russian clientele, while neighborhoods of the ultra-rich such as the fabled Ryublovka region outside of Moscow have seen an exodus. Unlike earlier waves of emigration, Russians leave these days to find a bit of peace and normality. They are materially well-off in Russia, but they are unhappy.

Unable to change a system where power is preserved through patronage and illegality, the government seems bent on trying to change the subject, much as the Communists once did. When Mr. Putin was booed recently as he went on stage to congratulate the winner of a martial-arts competition, Russian television edited out the snub. Coverage of the protests downplays their significance, just as state-controlled media went to great lengths to minimize coverage of the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. Mr. Putin, meanwhile, is often shown shirtless, in dark sunglasses or martial arts attire.

Mr. Putin will no doubt seek in the months ahead to portray his government as stable, fair and above all generous. But dissent seems to be stealing a march on the culture of compromise among many ordinary Russians and among the better-off. The result of March’s presidential election may be foregone, but regime change in countries where democracy is not respected doesn’t necessarily respect the electoral calendar. hairy woman payday loan https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php https://zp-pdl.com/emergency-payday-loans.php срочный займ на карту онлайн